Peter Vatistas

For the last week I have been getting flooding with emails from CNN and since yesterday MSNBC. Obviously these are new spam campaigns geared to trick people. I recommend deleting these emails immediately and I can confidently say the by next week it will be another news site, probably the BBC.

What you don’t want to do is click on any of these email to unsubscribe. By clicking unsubscribe you are notifying the spammer that you have a valid email account (and your dumb enough to click their spam) and you can bet your ass you’ll be seeing a lot more spam from now on. I’ve heard that there are viruses attached to these emails, I haven’t seen any. It may be due to my kick ass Antivirus - Nod32 by Eset. If you’ve noticed any viruses or spyware please let me know.

BTW, I have about 20 different email accounts across all service providers (gmail, msn, yahoo, exchange, etc…) and the only account that blocks all of these emails as well as all spam in general is gmail. I use Google Apps for my main email addy and it rocks, 0 spam in my inbox 100% of the time. If you’re having issues with spam it may be time to either look into gmail or adding a service like Postini to your email account.

Good luck!

Microsoft has announced that they will end retail sales of Windows XP on June 30th, 2008. Per Microsoft, original equipment manufacturers (OEM) may include Windows XP on low-cost PCs through June 30th, 2010. In addition, OEMs may offer Windows XP on other computers with the use of downgrade rights.

I’m not a fan of this decision; there are few companies I consult for who actually plan to migrate to Windows Vista. Most IT professionals I speak to say they plan to wait until Windows 7 releases before they migrate away from Windows XP.

The Ubuntu Live 2008 conference, which was scheduled to take place July 21-22 in Portland, OR has been canceled. Canonical plans to include some Ubuntu content in the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), also happening July 21-25 in Portland, Oregon.

For the official statement and more information please refer to the Ubuntu Live webpage.